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This is sort of emblematic of what's driving me nuts about these videos. Here's eight minutes. The first minute and a half are needless. All they do is cue up a cute symmetry with the ending line about opening lines. But the video isn't about opening lines, it's about metafiction. But then it isn't offering any advice about metafiction or how to incorporate that into your story. Instead, it's mostly just a highlight reel of how metafiction functioned in the Dark Tower series, with special attention paid to King's role. And then the author's big takeaway is a broad encouragement for writers to just get started on writing. I'm sorry, I thought we were here to "learn" something. Was that it? A Nike line? Are you serious?

How does the encouragement to "just get started" track with the central parallel? The author of the video points out the "unstuck-in-time" quality of Roland's chase with the Man in Black and compares it to the Road Runner and Wile Coyote. Given that analogy, are we Wile Coyote? Isn't then the implicit assumption that there's a degree of fatalism and tragedy to the "start" of Roland's quest? If so, why are you zigzagging from that to a cheery you-can-do-it easily-digestible slogan? How does that track with the previous six minutes?

It's a mess. It's an unclear mess. Like the Nerdwriter videos, this author compensates for the need to put out constant video by eliminating specificity and focus, by overemphasizing preamble.

That's actually been a useful tool lately. I'll watch these videos, wait for the video to reach its thesis, then study the video to see how long it took to reach the thesis, how they build up their argument for the thesis, and whether or not they even bothered to prove it (as opposed to seguing into a complementary argument and never going back). It's sobering and depressing.

In this video essay, Super Eyepatch Wolf breaks down how The Simpsons went from juggernaut to, well, today's Simpsons, showing what made the golden age such a cultural milestone (analyzing the original staff, it's writing, it's subtlety and characters) and how a series of circumstances both internal and external slowly but surely tore apart all of that and transformed it into a whole different show.

"The Big Bang Theory provides a perfect lens through which to deconstruct a popular media trope I like to call the Adorkable Misogynist. Adorkable Misogynists are male characters whose geeky version of masculinity is framed as comically pathetic yet still endearing. Their status as nerdy “nice guys” then lets them off the hook for a wide range of creepy, entitled, and sexist behaviors.

This is the 1st of two video essays about gender on The Big Bang Theory. Next month I'll focus on how the show relentlessly mocks its four male leads for not acting like “real men," and in so doing reinforces a whole bunch of regressive ideas about masculinity."

I find that Renegade Cut guy so boring. His tone of voice sounds like a speaking machine and sometimes he spends minutes describing the plot of the movie. If I'm watching the video, I've seen the movie.

I find that Renegade Cut guy so boring. His tone of voice sounds like a speaking machine and sometimes he spends minutes describing the plot of the movie. If I'm watching the video, I've seen the movie.

He does have those defects (his voice is specially jarring at times), but he's good with his insights.

"The Big Bang Theory delights in poking fun at its male characters for their geeky obsessions but there's something even more pernicious going on just under the surface. Beyond the mocking of geekdom, the show is relentless in making fun of its male leads for not being 'real men." In their quest to prove their manhood the four geeks then end up being complicit in many of the most harmful aspects of hypermasculinity.

This is the 2nd of two video essays about gender on The Big Bang Theory. The 1st focuses on a popular media trope I like to call the Adorkable Misogynist."